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  And it was time, then, to wonder why Sassy Gregg, who had looks, money and Mavis, should be an object of pity—even a tormented, vindictive pity. "You must be wrong, Mavis. What reason would you have to gloat over Sassy… or feel sorry for her?"

  "No reason I plan to talk about" Mavis said with unexpected firmness. Then, before Lon could react to the curt statement, Mavis went on, "But Sass and I have our moments. Except when I'm remembering she's a collector. Surprised she didn't flip over your purple passion-flower. Sass collects anything that's different. Jaded taste-buds, see?" Mavis laughed the quick needle laugh that always died as it started. "As she'd say—literally jaded. Then I cain't he'p remindin' her she's messed up wif a li'l ole nigrah gal who know all a-bout Miss Gregg. Engaged-to-marry Miz Gregg!"

  "Don't talk like that. And don't talk about her so much!" The jealous impulse engulfed Lon too suddenly to be squelched. "Talk to me about—oh, Sappho. I'd like to read some of her poems."

  "I'll see that you get them. Then there's Renee Vivien. She was born in Hawaii, come to think of it. Can't seem to get away from islands."

  "What about her? Who—?"

  "Gay poet. Either everybody who writes poetry is gay or everybody gay writes poetry. This one wrote in French."

  "I wouldn't understand that."

  "I remember one in English. Mentions another place where Sappho made out Mitylene."

  "Tell me."

  "Takes the right mood," Mavis said thickly. This time the soft black eyes captured Lon's with a fierce joy, a wild communication, at once tender and agonizing. Whose hand it was that moved first, Lon could not be sure. But in the meeting of eyes and clasping of fingers she found the words, the choked and swallowed words—setting them free now with an awed reverence. "I love you, Mavis." Their eyes held fast and something incendiary darted between them, but the older girl was silent. "You'll say I can't. Not this soon. You're thinking it's just an excuse—the gay excuse. But I knew that first time. Even before I learned what it's like... between girls. I knew." And the words exploded from her again in an anguished burst: "I love you!"

  Slim, dark fingers tightened around hers. Pressure of the moist warm palm. Oh, God, someone so beautiful, so bad, so unloved—so hopelessly necessary to love! And Lon waited, breathless, for the response that would echo what could be seen in the almond-shaped eyes, felt in the delicate hand. Waited for the sound and no sound came. Until, at last, the soft voice whispered in on kitten feet saying what Mavis could not say in her own words, because saying it meant dying slow. And Lon listened not to the poem she had been eager to hear, but to a gentle voice, now beloved:

  Those we love have scorned men...

  And we have the power

  To be at once lovers and sisters.

  In us, desire is less strong than tenderness,

  And our mistresses could not deceive us,

  Because it is the unfathomable in them which we love.

  Our days, without modesty, without fear or remorse.

  Unfold in slow, majestic harmony,

  And we love as they loved in Mitylene!

  * * *

  The lyric hung between them, leaving nothing more to say. And then, like the splintering of stained glass in a cathedral, Violet had joined them. Mavis drew her hand from Lon's to reach, she made it seem, for a cigarette.

  "Oh, hi, doll," Violet squealed as though she had not seen Mavis earlier. "I said t' myself, Jeez, if it ain't that cutie pie that was here before with that... What the hell was her name?"

  "Sassy," Mavis said flatly. "Sassy Gregg."

  "Well, funny thing, I was jest talkin' t' some a the kids and they said how come I haven't had a party fer ages? I always give these real crazy parties, kid. So I thought why don't I invite you an' that what's-her-name?"

  It was a new turn in Violet's one-track mind and it left Lon dumb. A party. Violet had been stewing at the bar, wringing her brains for a new maneuver and here it was. Here she was, too, ignoring her promise not to get in Lon's way and trusting Lon less with future arrangements now that the cotton-candy mind had spawned an idea.

  "How 'bout that, Lon? We'll have a real blast!"

  Lon cursed Violet with her eyes. Still, another chance to see Mavis soon...

  "Next Saturday. My house. Here." And Violet shoved a cocktail napkin at Mavis, a childish map scrawled across it with eyebrow pencil. "I wrote out how you find me, doll."

  Mavis was stuffing the instructions into a long, black, feed-bag pouch when the second interruption shattered what had been left of the mood. It was Betty, carrying a tray. "You ordered this at the bar, right hon?" She set a beer before Violet, Cokes before the others. Then, addressing Mavis, she said, "Don't look now, dear, but your girlfriend's outside. Better skip out the back door or go and pacify her. Rags is about to blow her stack!"

  There was a stiffening of breath around the table. Only Violet came to life audibly. "Sassy? She here, no kiddin'?"

  "I don't know her name," Betty told no one in particular. "That butch Rags threw out of here for giving me a rough go. She's been hammering the damn door down, yelling she won't leave until her girl comes out"

  Lon exchanged a meaningful look with Mavis. Oh, hell—goodbye—let's see each other soon—my God, what’s with Sassy?

  And then Mavis was moving across the dance-floor—walking slowly, with the exquisite face tilted upward and the long black feed-bag bouncing against her calf with every proud step.

  "We oughta go out, too. At least say hello," Violet said. The predatory quality in her voice made Lon want to strike her.

  Instead, Lon replied with measured deliberation, "I wouldn't mind going out—just to make sure everything's all right."

  They waited long enough for Violet to fortify herself with a quick swallow of beer and a quick inspection of her face in a compact mirror. Then, with Violet rehearsing the slinky walk with which Sassy would be approached, they followed Mavis out of the club.

  * * *

  The searching glare of the naked entrance light found them for Lon. They stood at the door of a gleaming red Corvette, Sassy looking at once like a blonde goddess and a ludicrous athlete in a long-sleeved yellow cotton and high-heeled pumps. But goddess or muscled human, she was furious. Her scalding, imperious tone carried to the doorway. "… the most filthy, literally repulsive tricks. Cruising this goddam garbage heap. You were meeting somebody here, damn you! You had a date with some dirty butch."

  Violet moved forward and Lon held her back with a warning command. "Wait."

  Lon could barely hear Mavis, yet the taunting expression in her voice came through. She faced the muscular blonde with an amused defiance. "Yo' keepin' tabs on me, Miz Gregg? Whar yo' bloodhounds?"

  "Don't antagonize me with that, Mavis. Damn you, I've had enough." And then, accusing rather than threatening, "I was jittery all evening, wondering if you'd really sink this low. Ruined my whole goddam date, telling Dur I had a headache and then coming home to find..."

  "Yo' upset, honey chile," Mavis crooned.

  Sassy's shriek ripped the midsummer stillness. "Stop that! I don't need that slut talk to tell me what you are."

  "Yas'm."

  The bland response seemed to goad Sassy's anger. Her arms shot out, grasping the dark girl's shoulders, shaking Mavis. "Haven't you done enough to me, you black bitch?" Mavis limp under the powerful hands, Sassy's hysteria reverberating through the parking area... And then it happened again. The hum in Lon's head, her mouth going dry, her fists clenching in sudden, mindless reaction.

  She lurched forward and Violet shrilled, "Don't stick your nose in it!" But Lon was sprinting the short distance toward the others, rushing Sassy with a courage bolstered subconsciously by her encounter at the Mermaid and with the outraged fury of a protecting lover.

  Violet's cry had spun the high-heeled Sassy around. She had let go suddenly of Mavis and was waiting for the onslaught. Her confidence betrayed itself in a contemptuous, crooked twist of her mouth. Lon's charge was blind, leaving
no doubt of her intention, no suggestion of verbal preliminary. Sassy shoved Mavis aside and stood ready.

  The first swipe of Sassy's arm caught Lon in the right breast. Unexpected pain numbed her and she toppled backward. Before Lon could regain her balance, Sassy reached forward in a surprisingly effortless move, clamping Lon's left wrist and forearm in an unrelenting grip. Her motion was that of a superbly coordinated jungle cat and her controlled ruthlessness was more an advantage than her superior size and strength. Lon felt herself balanced and upright for one dazed second. Then, as the blonde braced herself and yanked savagely at Lon's arm, the falling movement was reversed. Lon felt herself being swung in a stumbling half-circle and in the next instant grunted as the air smashed from her lungs, her body's impact against the convertible like a soundless black explosion under her belly. Her head and arms dangle'd inside the open car, the top of the door hard against her midriff.

  She struggled to pull herself up from the blackness, the wrath at her helplessness more painful than the pain itself. She pulled her arms upward toward the support of the leather-covered arm rest inside the door. But Sassy's rage was unspent. Lon gasped as the other girl's hands dug into her shoulder, jerking her upward and whirling her around like an impotent toy. Pinned against the metal hardness with the doorhandle crushing her spine, Lon caught an audible, sobbing breath. Her arms hung at her side like weights. And something vicious and inexorable pounded at her face and chest like an animate, crazed hammer. Dimly, she heard Violet scream—or was it Mavis whose thin cry reached her ears through the thud of blows? She was truly conscious only of the pummeling, punishing fists. And of her own humiliating immobility. Thinking, the left fist cuts. The diamond—it's the diamond!

  Almost gratefully, Lon felt herself thrust away from the support of the car door. She plunged downward, head reeling, eyes tightly closed. Instinct propelled her arms forward to break the fall and she hit the asphalt in a scraping of flesh as elbows and the underside of her forearms grazed the coarse pavement.

  It had been wordless, breathless and hopelessly swift. Sprawled with her face pressed against the dusty blacktop, Lon stirred as if in a tortured dream, uncertain that the muffled sounds around her were real. Dreamlike, it sounded as though it was Sassy, not she, herself, who sobbed hysterically, choking out the question—"Are you... corning home with me... or do you want... to stay here with... her?"

  Then, was it... Yes, yes it was Violet, placating and obsequious: "Jeez, don't feel bad, honey. She'll be okay. What the hell else could you of done, the way she blew her cork?"

  A dull slam. That would be the car door. Lon lay still, her mouth and nose throbbing, but aching more inside, listening for the second door to signal departure and finality. She heard it at last, filling in the waiting time with an awareness of the warm, sticky salt taste in her mouth and of independent hurts so numerous that they blended into one agonizing whole that was her body. The sound of a motor starting up. Above that sound a gently venomous voice, not unlike a dagger sheathed in velvet: "Reckon y'all satisfy now, Miz Gregg? Reckon it bettah if I drives yo' home?"

  Later, when the cool hands touched her cheeks, she knew they could only belong to Violet. For somewhere in between the words and the reviving touch, a motor had roared, gears had meshed and all that she loved now in the world was speeding away from her into the night. She was too benumbed now for tears of pain. It was only in the knowing that Mavis had gone that Lon Harris learned what it means to cry like an unloved child.

  Part Two

  SASSY

  CHAPTER 8

  The Gregg home, one of the show-places of a show-place area near a pass from the San Fernando Valley to Hollywood, was built on three levels, hugging the slope of a brush-covered hill. A tortuous road, graded at more expense than building the house itself had required, brought automobiles to the leveled hilltop. An expanse of dichondra lawn, professionally broken by groups of date palm, hibiscus, oleander and tropical plantings, framed a flagstone-bordered swimming pool whose designer had spared neither talent nor the Gregg assets in disguising it.

  The pool looked quite like a storybook illustration of a rustic pond: sapphire-blue proof of the perverse and ingenious American disposition to make something appear what it is not. In the tract houses constructed by Warren Gregg Development Company, Inc., dens that would later become bedrooms were decorated with wallpaper made in the image of knotty pine paneling; here, thirty thousand Gregg dollars had been dedicated to a filtered, heated, rock-and-moss-edged, back-yonder-on-the-farm, ole swimmin' hole.

  A glass-walled recreation room and adjoining cabanas looked over the pool and a sizeable portion of Los Angeles County. The room stretched itself luxuriously over the entire top level, and from it, a seemingly unsupported concrete stairway twisted downward to the wider bedroom level. The bottom floor was devoted to a starkly modern living room in which a minimum of living was done, due to the duplicated comforts and superior vista afforded by the uppermost level. This room shared space with a laboratory-styled kitchen that separated itself by means of an elongated bar from another spacious expanse that the architect, unfamiliar with Gregg temperaments, had innocently blueprinted as "the family room." Servants' quarters took up the rest.

  It was a cleanly conceived and executed house, depending on natural materials, unscrimped footage and meticulously planned built-ins to produce the unostentatious, uncluttered effect of luxury. It was the sort of house one might expect to find occupied by the family of a man whose wealth was the result of shrewdly crowding lesser areas of the county with unspacious, ostentatious, cluttered gingerbread houses. Houses hung with scalloped shutters that were not intended to shut, charming wren-holes carefully blocked, for sanitary reasons, to preclude occupation by bird life, and whatever worthless ornamentation might be required to convert the Cracker Box to the Dream. The Gregg domicile was both a monument and a stratified reaction to Warren Gregg's no-money-down Paradise Valley Estates, Lincolnshire Plaza and Robin Hood Highlands. And if the engineer who installed the stereophonic sound system suspected the nouveau riche Mr. Gregg's addiction to Lawrence Welk and Gene Autry, he was discreetly silent; ten grand would have erased the sentiments of Beethoven.

  * * *

  It was in her second-floor quarters, sandwiched between rooms designed for living and recreation, that Sassy wrestled with life, and, when Mavis was approachable, achieved recreation. At one a.m., following her encounter with Lon Harris, her gnawing need for Mavis was equalled only by the other girl's indifference.

  It had been a hell of a day, Sassy reminded herself. First that aggravating episode with Dr. Friedman, later the argument with Mavis, then the nerve-wracking hour with Durham Saunders, during which she could only wonder if Mavis had fulfilled her threat to visit The 28%. Finally, the fevered jealousy that culminated in a prideless drive to the club, with its revolting aftermath. Lon. Driving home, Mavis had referred to the infantile girl-hero as Lon.

  God, as though there weren't enough racking her up without this senseless new development! Mrs. Knippel spying on her—that Friedman ass pretending he didn't know that she didn't know what they were talking about—Durham halfheartedly accepting the limping excuse about her headache... these were torments with substance. There was another, greater torment, but she could not permit her mind to verbalize it; it was a monstrous sleeping dog that she let lie, convinced that neither God nor Leonard Friedman would make it go away. Tangible problems, these. Yet why was she plagued now by the incomprehensible thought that Mavis might be attracted to a scrawny, snot-nosed adolescent?

  To top it off, Sassy was positive that the woman was prowling outside the bedroom door, ears peeled. If I open the door suddenly, Sassy thought, Mrs. Knippel will come up with some inane excuse about looking for her damned cat or wondering if I need an extra blanket. If snooping housekeepers were in the best tradition, Knips was a paragon.

  "Mata Hari is at it again," Sassy told Mavis.

  Mavis worked an orangewood stick around the s
hell-pink nails. Oval nails and slim, delicate fingers. Sassy could never look long enough at those hands. "So she's hip." Mavis shrugged. "Told you she didn't buy that upstairs-maid bit."

  "Shh!" Sassy jerked open the door. There was no one in the hall, but she was sure that she heard carpet slippers padding softly on the staircase. "She heard us talking about her," Sassy said, and closed the door. Damn the woman. Just two days after Mavis had been "hired," Sassy had overheard Mrs. Knippel whispering to Mums. "Something funny going on between those two," the old crone had said. Damn her. This, in spite of all precautions, like letting Mavis off at the foot of the hill tonight, making her walk up the road so that they wouldn't come in together. And warning Mavis on other nights to be sure Knips was asleep before coming up from the maids' quarters behind the kitchen. "If she comes up again, tell her I asked you to do my hair," Sassy advised.

  "That's a right cool idea, Miz Gregg."

  How Mavis could squash her self-respect with that phony Southern drawl!

  "Look, Mave, my nerves are shot. I told you I was sorry about the kid. Stop putting on that silly act of yours just because you know I detest it"

  "Yas'm."

  "Goddamit, I said stop it. It's infantile. It's puerile."

  "Fo'got to say liter'lly neurotic, Miz Gregg."

  "Don't ridicule me. I'm depressed enough without being ridiculed." Sassy threw herself across the satin-quilted bed, stretching her arms before her until the long-sleeved pajama shirt drew taut across her shoulders. She fixed her eyes on Mavis, desire crowding out her annoyance as she studied the raw-boned, yet somehow fragile taffy-colored nakedness. "Let's not fight again, Mave."